When Time Pretends to Stop
I. April, Now
A moment of silence.
“I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped,” Ken Baldwin had said.
The other day, a graduate student attending my alma mater fell from the twelfth story of the Science Library, a stark, grim-looking brick of a building. An all too familiar building where many of us have camped out, hours at a time, inside its sun-deprived labyrinth. An all too familiar walkway between the Center for Information Technology and the SciLi where I have hurried past, large iced coffee from Blue State in hand, late for my lecture in Macmillan. Now that strip of ground has experienced not only the footsteps of frazzled students, but also the dull thud of a brittle body, broken and weary.
How many of these backpack-carrying, briskly walking, young minds of the future hide portals to darkness behind their pupils?
A moment of silence — a break from debugging the fluorescent code on your screen, from transporting the pizza from your greasy plate to your salivating mouth, from that new episode of your current TV obsession waiting to be played on your laptop.
He is not any one of us, and we are not any bit of him.
But those times alone inside your head, inside your room, inside whatever unforgiving establishment you are a part of; times when it is easier to sink further into your bed and shut your eyes tight than to face the reality you’ve gotten yourself into; times when even bottles of liquor and cocktails of pills are not enough to save you from the sunlight of another day…
These experiences we have shared, in varying degrees and time points in life.
In isolation, we are together.
In misery, we must seek out company.
With much pain and melancholy and futile frustration: a moment of silence.
II. March, A Month Ago
White ceiling, tinted gray by night shadows reluctant to give way to morning light. Walls too, shadow-white with a hint of lavender. Marshmallow pillows. Marshmallow sheets. Bodies still, encapsulated in invisible Jello — the embodiment of time gone gelatinous.
The outside world was half hidden by cream-colored curtains. Snow silently floating down, coating the trees, cars, roofs; even the sun, struggling to shine through, in powder white. It was the serenity of the dead of winter.
And I lay there, in stillness, the left half of me blanketed by a warm body. His head resting on my shoulder; tangled hair lightly brushing my skin; pale glow illuminating the contours of his unshaven cheek. The weight of his leg is heavy but comforting, resting diagonally across my torso. I tilt my head towards his, gently, so as to not disturb the silence.
In sleep, we are all defenseless.
I watch his eyes move back and forth beneath his eyelids. With each flutter of lashes, speculating if this time they will finally snap open. Snap, open, into icy blue pools, daring me to fall in.
Should I? No. Would I? Undoubtedly, yes.
In the moment, thinking, if this could last — if I could stretch this point in time to infinity — how peaceful that would be. If there were no past and no future, nothing to reminisce and nothing to anticipate. Just this.
The smell of morning coffee wafted in from the kitchen; his valiant attempt to jump-start time in this timeless room before he succumbed, once again, to its gentle lull.
In a few hours, we would be hurrying down the snow-covered streets on our way to work. In a few hours, there would be deadlines and papers. There would be things required from us and things to be required of others. But for this moment, just for this moment, I merely exist in this singular point in time with the snow and the sheets and this creature heavy with sleep —
And I lay there, in stillness.
The beauty of this all — of momentary lapses in time, of seemingly endless darkness, of almost surreal tranquility — is that
whether we experience infinite elation or deep depression,
none of it
[not a single thing]
lasts.
